Product dispensers for compelling a flowable product from a deformable container are known in the art and are generally seen in U.S. Pat. No. 4,125,206 issued to Wilson on a toothpaste dispenser; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,508,242 issued to Wolfe on a toothpaste extractor.
Certain prior art product dispensers include a screw or worm gear retained within a frame having a squeezing member received upon the screw to travel from a first end of the screw to a second end of the screw to compel a flowable product from a container. Once the squeezing member has reached the end of its travel at the second end of the screw, a user must actuate the squeezing member and, therefore, the screw in a reverse direction so that the squeezing member travels along the screw back towards the first end.
These prior art product dispensers require the squeezing member to travel along the length of the screw first to dispense product from a container and then reverse its direction along the screw without any work performed other than to return the squeezing member back to its origin. This requires unproductive time on the part of the user to reconfigure the dispenser for subsequent use. Further, this type of mechanism is inefficient and causes undue fatigue upon a user's fingers with manually actuated product dispensers and undue stress upon mechanical and electrical parts in an automatically actuated product dispenser, leading to accelerated mechanical and/or electrical failure of prior art product dispensers. In addition, these prior art product dispensers are generally complex in order to accommodate both forward and reverse travel of the squeezing member retained within the frame. These product dispensers have many moving parts and are not economical to manufacture or repair.